I once asked my mother to answer some probing family questions. Unable to cope with the tape recorder, she wrote a numbered list in a letter. Opening my bottom desk drawer, the heavy one near the floor weighed down by the past, I re-read the letter, her speaking voice recognizable. I hesitated again at slight errors, syntax, word usage or spelling salting this script with her always in the central role.
My father, her husband, was gay, she hinted lewdly like a stand-up comedienne, informing me his friend from army days declined their written offer to be best man at their wedding, beginning his return letter with “My darling Georgie.” What was I supposed to think? Now long dead, she still triggered my vexation: the way she called me “Professor” even though I had no such career, just late education I sensed she resented. She asserted her will by inflection, staking claims, her own martyr’s efforts, damnation of others, according to her prejudices or guilt. But there is also a poignant between the lines aspect; that of a woman feeling accused craving merciful understanding.
I dined at The Dark Lady, I wrote to a friend on a saucy postcard, truth as a joke, posturing in fourteen lines about stretching my funds by supping at a mobile kitchen near Heathrow’s labyrinthine hotel that seemed futuristic, ironically, in 1984 when British TV produced excellent features with Orwellian themes. Titles kept cropping up in my mind, The Enigma of Arrival appropriate. In the tiled Tube a saxophonist echoed Lennon’s imagination.
I was there to investigate past paradoxes, cause and effect, their undertow, potential for chaos, in my family, not about to succumb to love of place and time. A kind of euphoria beckoned despite the cold, a smell of iron as that city swallowed me with no return air ticket’s limitation. Starting my stumbling search for those still alive who knew my parents to discover what happened before my time, I couldn’t picture their eventual reunion on TV resulting from my research that I would watch from a green room, struggletown of yesteryear’s lives stripped bare.
My mother said I was stubborn, like my father, but hooked on history, on explanation. Imagining snow silently blanketing South London as I tracked him, I knew my father had boxed, wanting to excavate his haunts, pound through his bruising biography, see where his clan had shouted. To understand why, I did roadwork in his districts. At his childhood address opposite a public toilet – I preferred a Cotswold thatched cottage ancestry but the trail led to Battersea – I spoke to an elderly man who resembled a retired wiry flyweight, hoping to improve my ring lore. A camera obscura, exposing spectral scenes, my pain at times was acute, like copping a rip to the solar plexus.
My older brother, dead before my birth, was only ill for three days. After retching over soiled nappies my mother had taken him to the hospital by bus, too late. His casket was small enough to be gripped in one man’s large hands. There was no headstone, just debt weighing on grief, debt her single sailor brother cleared before his destroyer was torpedoed. I wonder if she bore this news to her extended family in person, a harbinger catching yet another bus with my toddler sister, weather churning about her like fear, reduced, almost overwhelmed by this familiar journey.
Or did she write, pen poised above her best notepaper, searching for the right words, striving for dignity despite such pain squatting in her heart? Did she walk with her letters to the post-box, letting go, her unrealized hopes dropping through a black slot into the remote dark? Would she have described the cot, my father, that boxer, broken after coming home from work to the news, finally lowering his trembling chopper amidst splinters, his heart a wild thing in his chest, the shrieking silence, madly spinning mobiles stilled?
— Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.